I have never been brilliant with directions, and my arrival at the Split Klis holiday home proved this beyond all doubt. The flight into Split was smooth enough, and the hire car was a cheerful little thing that buzzed along the coastal road with the windows down and the smell of pine and salt everywhere. I had the address, I had Google Maps, I had that dangerous confidence of someone who once navigated Cornwall without incident. What could possibly go wrong?

The trouble began at Klis itself. The fortress loomed above me, magnificent and ancient, and I thought, brilliant, I am basically here. I turned up a narrow lane that looked promising, then another, then found myself in what I can only describe as someone's olive grove. A very patient man in a faded football shirt waved me back down the hill with the resigned expression of someone who had done this many times before. I reversed with the grace of a confused elephant, crunched something that turned out to be an empty water bottle, and finally found the proper turning.

The property itself sits in that glorious hinterland between Split and the fortress, surrounded by dry stone walls and those scrubby Mediterranean plants that always look slightly surprised to be alive. I pulled up with gravel crunching and immediately committed my second error of the day. In my flustered state, I opened the car door straight into a low stone wall. Not hard enough to damage anything except my dignity, but quite hard enough to send my sunglasses skittering under the vehicle. There I was, minutes into my Dalmatian holiday, lying on warm tarmac in late afternoon sun, fishing for spectacles and muttering apologies to no one in particular.

The key safe was exactly where the instructions said, which felt almost miraculous by this point. I fumbled the code twice, blaming the sunlight, though honestly my hands were still a bit shaky from the olive grove incident. The door opened onto cool tile and that particular hush that proper old stone buildings have. I stood there with my ridiculous wheeled suitcase, suddenly aware that I smelled of aeroplane and stress and probably looked like someone who had been mildly traumatised by rural navigation.

But then I stepped through to the terrace, and everything slowed down properly. The view opens up across the valley towards Split itself, with the sea glinting in the distance and the mountains rising behind. The light at that hour is extraordinary, all honeyed and soft, and somewhere nearby a dog barked in that lazy Mediterranean way that suggests even the animals cannot be bothered with urgency. I found my sunglasses still miraculously unscratched, poured a glass of the terrible wine I had bought at the airport, and sat down on a slightly wobbly plastic chair that I immediately decided was perfect.

The kitchen smelled faintly of lavender from a dried bunch hanging by the window. The bathroom had that particular clean white tile that makes everything feel more Mediterranean than it strictly is. I wandered through rooms that were simple and unpretentious, the sort of place where you immediately stop worrying about leaving sandy footprints or dripping swimming costumes.

My neighbour, I later discovered, was the same man from the olive grove. He brought me tomatoes the following morning, small and intensely flavoured, and we communicated in elaborate gestures and broken Italian since my Croatian extends to approximately three words, two of them probably wrong. He seemed to find the whole thing amusing, which I suppose it was.

That first evening, I cooked badly with ingredients I did not quite understand, watched the sun drop behind the mountains, and felt the particular peace of having arrived somewhere slightly chaotic but entirely worthwhile.